https://www.presspage.com/news/
Empowering your messageen-usSat, 17 Feb 2018 16:46:15 +0100Tue, 06 Feb 2018 17:01:43 +0100https://presspage-production-content.s3.amazonaws.com/clients/150_63.jpghttps://www.presspage.com/news/
1443 examples of increased ROI with newsroom centered digital communications strategieshttps://www.presspage.com/news/3-examples-of-increased-roi-with-newsroom-centered-digital-communications-strategies/
https://www.presspage.com/news/3-examples-of-increased-roi-with-newsroom-centered-digital-communications-strategies/Many PR folks believe that traffic is the most important metric for their newsroom. However, the success of a site is based on much more than simply attracting a certain number of visitors. High website traffic -although not unimportant- is perhaps the most common myth of all when it comes to measuring newsroom success.

In part 1 of 3, we highlight three successful examples of communications professionals that reshaped their digital strategy with a newsroom focused approach.

]]>1. Curacao Tourist Board

Although Curacao is a well known holiday destination, their PR team does not sit on its laurels. In an effort to make the transition in their marketing efforts towards digital and inbound marketing, the team adopted a newsroom centric approach. Some key indicators of their new strategy being successful are:

Referral traffic from the newsroom to main website has increased with over 180%.

Paid search expenditure has been reduced by 20% due to newsroom success.

2. Cook Children's Health Care System

Cook Children's has made its newsroom an online destination for not only parents, but the industry and media alike. In record time, Cook Children's Health Care System gained a large loyal audience with a (visitor returning rate) of over 89%.

The Fort Worth based hospital’s brand journalism strategy has direct bottom line impact as its stories made one Detroit family decide to fly cross country for surgery after reading an impactful story on Checkupnewsroom.com.

Another article that broke readership records -by garnering over one million readers in less than three days- was “7 dangerous Apps that parents need to know.” The article scored very high on reader engagement with over 800 comments and thousands of shares.

3. Marathon Petroleum Corporation

The MPC newsroom launched early 2015 and coincided with the company’s rollout of its first social media activities. The newsroom became instrumental in Marathon’s rapid growth to 3,000 followers on Facebook and 34,000 on LinkedIn.

Social analytics showed that 15-20 percent of the people exposed to a given post followed through to the newsroom where they spent an average of 1.5 minutes reading the article. Additionally, due to the seamless visitor experience between the newsroom and the rest of Marathon’s website, a higher number of visitors than ever before click through to explore the rest of the main site.

]]>SaaS,PressPage,Case,Marathon Petroleum Corporation,ROI,Cook Children's Healthcare System,Curacao Tourist BoardTue, 06 Feb 2018 10:01:43 -0600CIPR's revitalized newsroom strategy attracts devoted audiencehttps://www.presspage.com/news/ciprs-revitalized-newsroom-strategy-attracts-devoted-audience/
https://www.presspage.com/news/ciprs-revitalized-newsroom-strategy-attracts-devoted-audience/Average 25% increase in traffic indicates newsroom is attracting loyal readership. For professional associations it is vital to stay on top of developments in their industry. It is no different for the UK's leading professional PR association; the Chartered Institute of Public Relations. The CIPR was founded in 1948, and as an organization they have kept evolving to ensure they provide their members with thought leadership, best practice, and an industry voice.
We spoke with Koray Camgoz, the CIPR's Public Relations Manager, who is responsible for setting the communications strategy for the entire organization, including their online newsroom.
]]>How does an organization like CIPR handle its own PR?

For the CIPR, there is always plenty to communicate, because as an organization, they are constantly working on new and different things. “For example, one of our key policy issues is ethical conduct in public relations. A short while ago there was an issue with Bell Pottinger…”[a British PR agency], “which prompted a huge interest spike in ethics in public relations. This was good news, because people were interested in hearing to about ethics and ethical conduct,” Koray says.

Connecting time-lines to topics the CIPR already covers, is important. It just so happens that October was the Ethics Month for the institute, in which they published a podcast, welcomed a statement around a new global ethical conduct for PR by the Global Alliance and so forth. Koray played an important role: “My role was drafting the statement, gettings quotes from the Global Alliance, from our president, and then packaging everything into one press release. Alongside that, I am also responsible for getting our message out, so I upload the press release to the newsroom, contact people in the industry [social media influencers as well as journalists] to get them talking about it and covering it in their media."

Matching message to channel

For each type of message, there is a specific channel that is best suited as a 'carrier.' Koray explains: “Traditionally we see that for us Twitter is the biggest driver of traffic, even more so than trade press. However it can be very dependent on the story, but I usually start with Twitter.” According to Koray, Twitter plays the most important role in communications because the PR industry is obsessed with it. “It can be a bit of bubble sometimes. For a lot of PR professionals, it is the first thing they look at when they wake up.” Although this does not necessarily sound like the most relaxed morning ritual, it might explain why it is the primary driver of traffic for the CIPR's news releases.

Facebook is also becoming increasingly more relevant as a distrbution channel. However, it must be noted that for the CIPR it is best suited for non-controversial articles. “Since organic posting on Facebook is nearly impossible, we always boost our Facebook posts. Previously, CIPR was using Facebook exclusively for marketing, for example to promote awards qualifications, which works well due to the specific targeting options. This success got me thinking about using news on Facebook. Sometimes it has been really successful; some posts got hundreds and hundreds of likes, tons of shares, and has driven traffic to the newsroom. Unfortunately there have also been others that have just stimulated huge arguments and caused issues.”

The CIPR also makes active use of their Facebook Newsroom, a repository of news articles directly in sync with their online newsroom.

For the more business minded pieces the CIPR has opted to use LinkedIn. Statistics for the newsroom give the CIPR insight into what works and what does not. Koray indicates “it has given me appreciation that we have to use the right content for sharing in the right channels.”

The benefits of having an easy-to-use online newsroom

Having a central place where all news releases are easily searchable, accessible and shareable for different audiences is essential in modern PR. Luckily for Koray, when he started his role at CIPR, the organization was already using PressPage for the their online news. “When I first logged in, I found it very easy to use. To make sure I knew enough about the platform, I placed a call with our dedicated PressPage Customer Success Manager as to get the best out of all the features available.”

With the branded PressPage newsroom in place, Koray has no issues in taking a brief holiday when needed. A temporary hand-over is not a problem: “It is easy to train other people to use it. When I go on a holiday, I just make sure my colleagues are able to get on the platform and do the basics. They don’t need to know everything and the platform is intuitive enough for them to easily do what they need to do.”

The newsroom as an important traffic driver

Since taking on the role, Koray has led changes in how the newsroom is used. “We see a positive increase in the number of unique visits to the newsroom, due to a slight change of strategy. I have put much more emphasis on driving people directly to the newsroom.” Next to that, the institute now also uses the newsroom more to publish a wider array interesting PR-related news topics. “Over the past 12 to 16 months, there have been a range of interesting stories that we’ve published, which have led our key stakeholders coming directly to us for news.” As the discussion over PR's effectiveness lingers on, attribution and bottom-line contribution to an organization's goals are becoming key aspects of measurability. So, publishing relevant stories, distributing these through appropriate channels, and bringing them back to once central place, is making Koray's efforts quantitative.

The CIPR acknowledges the positive impact of including digital assets like videos and images into an online release. “Whenever there is a chance to publish a video, we try to do that. I really like the fact that it is easy to embed videos from YouTube or Vimeo, or a Podcast from Soundcloud directly in the release. This is great and it enables us to enrich the releases."

Improving based on experience and insights

The PressPage platform offers CIPR more insights not only into the amount of visitors, but also where the visitors are coming from. “We know that Twitter is more of a bubbled network, however, we wanted to reach people outside of that circle. Using Facebook to spread our news gave us the opportunity to reach a more international audience.

The CIPR uses this information to continually evaluate and adapt the content they create and publish. “We target different groups with different languages and content all the time. When we send out emails, we personalize the message to the group we are sending it to, to target them in the best way. But we also use the information gathered via the statistics in the platform to adapt our message or use different distribution channels.

]]>PressPage,Case,CIPRTue, 12 Dec 2017 15:20:30 -0600Miami International Airport lands major industry comms award with newsroomhttps://www.presspage.com/news/miami-international-airport-lands-major-industry-comms-award-with-newsroom/
https://www.presspage.com/news/miami-international-airport-lands-major-industry-comms-award-with-newsroom/Airports Council International - North America awards MIA coveted industry prize as newsroom visitor numbers surge.On November 7, the Airports Council International - North America (ACI-NA) announced Miami International Airport as the recipient of the 2017 Peggy G. Hereford Award out of over 300 entries. This award recognizes MIA for Excellence in Airport Marketing and Communications, with their PressPage newsroom playing a key role in the accomplishment.
]]>Through September 2017, Miami International Airport was dealing with Hurricane Irma, which severely affected the airport's operations. The PR and communications team not only worked overtime to timely inform travellers, affected families, employees, partners and a multitude of other audiences of the disruption and consequences, they also successfully combatedfake newsconcerning their airfield being flooded.

The recognition of Miami International Airport was long due even before it responded to the Irma crisis. In early September, the airport was named “Best Freighter Hub” in the world at the Freighters World Conference Awards, in recognition of its excellence in the global air cargo sector over the past year.

And in October, the airfield wontwo more awardsin recognition of its efforts to reduce its environmental footprint and conserve natural resources from the Florida Airports Council Specialty Conference in Orlando. In all three achievements, the PR and communications team played a role in highlighting the efforts and later promoting the recognition of the airport’s outstanding work.

Now, it is the PR and communications team’s turn to celebrate at Miami International Airport.

The Peggy G. Hereford Award

The ACI-NA is the industry's main association whose member airports cater to more than 95 percent of the domestic and virtually all the international airline passenger and cargo traffic in North America. On November 7, Miami International Airport was named the recipient of thePeggy G. Hereford award, the conference's top accolade. The Peggy G. Hereford Award is given to honor creativity, effectiveness in reaching audiences with a message, and the overall scope of an airport’s effort in marketing and public relations. This award is regarded throughout the airport industry as the highest honor an airport can earn for marketing and communications excellence.

The award recognizes overall MIA's creativity in communicating the airports message, effectiveness in connecting with audiences, and the overall scope of the airports effort in marketing and public relations.

The Magnetic effects of a newsroom

MIA launched their revamped social newsroom in March of 2016 switching from a native newsroom -driven by their website’s standard CMS- to PressPage, a dedicated newsroom solution for digital PR and media relations. Within 12 months, their number of unique monthly newsroom visitors grew by over 3,300%. Part of the success has to do with the airport's PR and communications team acknowledging that the media landscape has changed tremendously and embracing this change as part of their strategy.

In the past, PR departments of many organizations viewed traditional media outlets as the only way to talk to their audience. Today, social media allows organizations to directly communicate with their audiences on issues that do not interest the mainstream media so much, but are interesting and relevant for many.

Director of PR & Digital Marketing, Dickie Davis, who last year wonACI-NA's Bushelman Legacy Award, is clear about the path the airport's communication strategy is taking. "In 2011 MIA won the same award. Since then we have been on a trajectory of excellence and realize, like any other publisher, we have to tell our own story."

But the job is not close to being done, Davis assures. Miami international -who by the way handle all of their creative comms processes, from concepting, drawing up collateral and digital productions completely in house- is gearing up for more digital action in the form of video, infographics and other types of digital animations. This surely bringing more value to their newsroom.

Media relations

According to Greg Chin, the airport's Communications Director and main media relations contact, journalists appreciate the social newsroom centric approach.

For MIA, the digital media release format on the newsroom allows them to deconstruct their news releases into multiple content sections (copy, quotes, images, videos, infographics, ...) so that as a publisher, it is facilitating the journalist's process of cherry picking whatever useful information they need to assemble coverage.

And the newsroom is a winner

The category "Websites," was won for the launch of a sleek, easy-to-read News Room site that better showcased the airport’s press releases and marketing material, offered seamless integration for social media sharing and search engine optimization (SEO), and generated an exponential increase in online visitor traffic and engagement.

]]>Blog,Client,MIA,Miami,Aviation,Airport,CaseFri, 10 Nov 2017 07:07:11 -0600Travel to Curacao Tourist Board's online newsroom increased 180%https://www.presspage.com/news/curacao-tourist-board-tells-their-story/
https://www.presspage.com/news/curacao-tourist-board-tells-their-story/How a social newsroom led to spiking traffic and decreasing costs.If you think about white beaches, lovely weather and friendly people, there is a big chance Curacao will pop up in your mind. Curacao Tourist Board is the organization that is responsible for promoting this destination to potential visitors throughout the world. By using the PressPage platform, they have a beautiful home for their stories.
]]>We spoke with Angelo Harms, Digital Marketing Manager at Curacao Tourist Board about his role and responsibilities and the results they have achieved by using PressPage to tell the ‘Curacao story.’

Promoting the beautiful destination

Although Curacao is a well known holiday destination, there is always work to be done. Angelo Harms, Digital Marketing Manager at Curacao Tourist Board: “When I started in my current role, we felt like we needed to transition our marketing efforts more towards what the trend is nowadays: digital and inbound marketing.” In his role, he is responsible for the overall awareness of the location online, inbound traffic, social media, SEO, and content marketing. Along with their local office, Curacao Tourist Board also has overseas offices in The Netherlands, Germany, Brazil, Australia, United States, and Canada. While the global strategy is created in the head office in Curacao, each individual office is responsible for creating tactics to best execute this strategy in their particular region.

The primary focus of their Marketing and Public Relations efforts is branding and awareness of the holiday destination. By creating individual campaigns for the regions, they try to reach their target audience: people within the age of 25 to 65, middle to upper income and in their target markets. Harms explains: “For example, in June we have set up a storytelling campaign, encouraging people who have visited Curacao to share their story. We hope to generate curiosity and desire among people who are thinking about visiting Curacao.” Every campaign uses the channels that suit the topic and the target audience best. For example, currently, they are targeting people in Chicago via a mobile campaign.

A home for their stories

Before Curacao Tourist Board was using PressPage, they were already publishing content via social media. However, this was content from sources other than their own, therefore it did not link back to their website. Because their audience was not visiting their website, they would often miss out on valuable information about Curacao. Harms explains that “during a social media event in Chicago, I got in touch with PressPage. After the demo, I was convinced. In particular, the SEO options and storytelling features captured my attention. When I saw the logos of their other clients on their website, we definitely knew PressPage was a good fit for us.”

From that point on, the whole process went quite fast. Harms worked on the procurement together with his IT colleague and the PressPage team. “It all went well. Some things took a little longer than expected but that was due to the two different platforms we were working on.” All in all, the whole implementation process went faster than they anticipated.

With PressPage, they now have a good content home that allows them to publish their stories to an even wider audience. “Publishing stories is really easy – the platform is extremely user-friendly. You just copy-paste your text into a release in the newsroom.” When they ran into some problems with their social channels (due to the transition from their Facebook account into a business account), one call with their Customer Success Manager at PressPage was enough to fix the problem.

More traffic and less costs

Looking at the total picture and comparing it to the situation before, Curacao Tourist Board has achieved some tremendous results. Since they started using PressPage, their referral traffic from the newsroom to their website has increased more than 100%. Harms says, “something that we are really proud of is that the newsroom appears as number 7 in our top 10 list of traffic sources. I am more than happy with that.”

What’s next to come?

Promoting the experiences of visitors to the island is something that Curacao Tourist Board is eager to do. Harms says, “we are about to launch an experience tourism campaign. We plan to share videos of visitors recounting their experiences in Curacao.” The PressPage platform enables them to tell these stories while driving inbound traffic back to their website.

]]>Newsroom,SaaS,PressPage,news,newclient,cases,CaseFri, 06 Oct 2017 04:00:00 -0500Emergency communications in the era of social mediahttps://www.presspage.com/news/emergency-communications-in-the-era-of-social-media/
https://www.presspage.com/news/emergency-communications-in-the-era-of-social-media/Social media plays growing role in crisis communications: lessons from Harvey and Irma.According to the FCC, Harvey has disrupted at least 17 emergency call centers and 320 cellular sites, and it has caused outages for more than 148,000 Internet, TV, and phone customers. It is also reported that 9 radio stations went out of service. Emergency services, victims, local authorities and organizations turned to social media to stay connected.
]]>Hurricane Harvey was the first major Atlantic hurricane to make landfall in the United States in 12 years. Since Wilma in 2005, no hurricanes have made landfall with such destructive power.

Harvey was the wettest tropical hurricane on record in the United States to date. In the four-day period it struck, it dropped more than 40 inches of rain in many places in the eastern Texas region.

Soon after Harvey, Irma, a second major Atlantic hurricane, caused widespread and catastrophic damage throughout parts of the northeastern Caribbean and the Florida Keys. The Cape Verde type hurricane was typed as the most intense since Dean in 2005.

Emergency communications go social

In order to be prepared for an emergency -- whether it is a fire, natural disaster or any other event -- many organizations have an emergency communications plan that often times does not yet include social channels.

Yet, according toCNN, hundreds of stranded Texans sought help by posting on Facebook and Twitter. They organized rescue missions through Facebook groups. And they posted harrowing pictures to emphasize just how high the flood waters were.

TheWall Street Journalreports on incidents of users taking the unusual step of sharing their full names and addresses across public channels like Facebook and Twitter. Even going as far as tagging news outlets, journalists and other prominent individuals in their social-media posts in hopes their messages would be shared widely and eventually answered.

Countering misinformation

However well-intentioned the social posts of people in distress and citizen journalists might be, sometimes they can be factually incorrect. Miami International Airport had to deal with a video of Mexico City's airport that on social was claimed to be at Miami International.

Mashable reported the misappropriated video was even retweeted by President Donald Trump's director of social media, Dan Scavino Jr.

The newsroom as emergency hub

At PressPage (provider of social newsrooms) we also noted a steep rise in emergency traffic on newsrooms of companies in the affected areas. Most of the traffic coming from mobile devices by means of social channels.

A social newsroom can play a key role in coherent and effective emergency communications. The visitor statistics above clearly indicate the spike in traffic to a newsroom as the winds and rains from Irma came to Georgia.

Pre- and post emergency communications

The statistics below clearly indicate the pre-hurricane pro-active communications efforts of an organization in the aviation industry, and how it picked up post-storm disaster recovery messaging to stakeholders.

The difference between unique and total amount of visitors indicates there is a large audience that frequently returns to the website looking for the latest updates.

Platform and channel agnostic publishing

A key aspect for successful communications during a crisis situation is the ability to publish single origin news messaging that stands out and catches attention on the main social channels. Additionally, the destination link should take readers to a platform agnostic page that renders well on mobile devices, (desktop) computers, and in all major browsers.

“Can’t connect to server”

So what happens when a crisis hits? Traffic to your newsroom is great, but a sudden influx of traffic that is too large, could crash your site.

An important aspect of newsroom infrastructure during an emergency is auto scaling. Auto scaling allows better availability of your newsroom during sudden spike traffic incidents. If configured correctly, it will launch instances in new geographical Availability Zones. In other words, if one physical server park is compromised, it will automatically switch to servers in a different geographical location. Additionally, and more commonly known, auto scaling ensures that your newsroom always has the right amount of capacity to handle the current traffic demands.

"By failing to prepare, you are preparing to fail"

When a natural disaster occurs, organizations can build lasting trust with communities by being reliable purveyors of information, to warn, reassure and sometimes rescue their audiences in affected areas.

Yet many well-intentioned organizations miss this critical opportunity through the ‘that won’t happen to us’ mindset. If you wait until a crisis hits to ask whether your newsroom auto-scales, whether your audience knows where to reach you, or who makes up your crisis communication team, it is usually already too late.

Ultimately, whether you are a large organization in a metropolitan city, or a small mom and pop store in a rural area, the key difference between an effective and ineffective response to crises, usually ends up being the preparation you put in beforehand.

Download our white paper on how to prepare your newsroom for a crisis; presenting a systematic approach to a seamless and smarter crisis management, specified per phase:

Pre-crisis: How to prepare for when the unexpected happens.

During: How to systematically use your newsroom and leverage social channels to get the message out.

Post-crisis: the importance of SEO in the aftermath of a crisis.

]]>Newsroom,SaaS,PressPage,Case,news,Emergency,Harvey,Irma,crisisMon, 18 Sep 2017 15:12:06 -0500VELUX: “We need a strong digital window to the world”https://www.presspage.com/news/velux-we-need-a-strong-digital-window-towards-the-world/
https://www.presspage.com/news/velux-we-need-a-strong-digital-window-towards-the-world/The VELUX Group is an international company headquartered in Denmark, manufacturing roof windows, modular skylights and accessories to create better living environments for their customers. With a presence in over 40 countries, it requires a future-focused PR platform that enables VELUX sales companies to convey effective and consistent messaging towards various stakeholders.
]]>We spoke to Kathrine Westermann and Carsten Suhr about the challenges theVELUX Groupencounters in the media landscape and how they use PressPage to overcome them.

A social media newsroom strengthening outreach

Sensing the rapidly changing media landscape, the VELUX corporate media relations team realized four years ago that they needed more than a traditional corporate newsroom to meet the future needs of their PR teams across markets.

In the future the VELUX Group would need one digital newsroom with the potential to work as a content hub journalists could pull press releases, images and videos from, but also a platform with social media were integrated, as they anticipated the disciplines would merge much more. Therefore the PressPage solution appeared as a new attractive platform.

The PressPage platform helped incorporate two central goals of the press department: press relations and increasing outreach through social media. The platform’s integration with social media has strengthened the Group’s reach, allowing them to turn their newsroom into a campaign hub from where they can launch content and bring traffic back to one single location. For Kathrine Westermann, “the newsroom is so much more in sync with how you do outreach today[…] It allows us to communicate on many channels, which is a big plus.”

A coherent global PR strategy

Although the VELUX Group started with just one newsroom for their corporate headquarter, today they run 14 individual VELUX newsrooms across Europe and North America using the PressPage platform. A significant factor in choosing PressPage was the coherent corporate branding that could be applied across their national newsrooms. Westermann explains “the newsroom reflects our brand and is completely in line with our corporate identity, our corporate website and our national marketing sites.” Using PressPage, each national team manages their content, while allowing the company to maintain a consistent brand message across each newsroom.

Westermann explains that they can now look at their overall global strategy, and easily decide to “boost their media performance in a specific country”. In fact, after the national offices in Poland, The Netherlands and France incorporated PressPage into their PR workflow, they recommended it to other sales regions within the VELUX Group.

PressPage as a Partner

Carsten Suhr, Senior Digital Business Strategy Manager at VELUX Group, was involved in the process of defining newsroom requirements and selecting a suitable newsroom platform.

“We are happy with the collaboration with PressPage. The feedback we provided during the onboarding and after the launch was taken seriously, and some requests they made have been turned into improvements of the platform.” Suhr notes “PressPage was a logic choice for us as a newsroom solution, but also in terms of attitude. We really liked the way PressPage looks at development and innovation.” PressPage relies heavily on the input of clients to prioritize developments and new features. The VELUX Group found this to be a great asset in the process.

Suhr goes on to explain, “for us, PressPage is a partner, not a vendor. It is not just about having a great newsroom, but it is also about good support in the roll-out of the newsroom and a high level of service. PressPage provides training and support to our media relations team who are the users of the platform. You don’t need your local web person to support your internal PR people; you have a dedicated PressPage support team that helps our staff around the clock”.

Flexibility and Ease of Use

For Westermann and Suhr, it was the platform’s flexibility and ease of use that made a big difference in the end. Their old content management system was laborious and unnecessarily complex, requiring the VELUX team to send press releases to an external vendor to publish on their behalf. Westermann explains that “in the long tendering process one of the most important points for us was to get full control of the editorial process.”

Using PressPage changed this, giving the media relations team full editorial power and the ability to decide what the content flow should be. They can edit releases in the newsroom instantly at any moment, without being dependent on external support.

Along with the ease of use, the editorial freedom also extends to analytics – the VELUX Group PR team no longer needs to dive into complex Google Analytics reports to gain insights into their traction. Using an easy to understand Statistics module in PressPage, the VELUX team is able to gain insights, and then optimize all their digital content.

]]>Newsroom,SaaS,PressPage,news,newclient,cases,CaseFri, 15 Sep 2017 02:41:00 -0500How OhioHealth increased their newsroom coverage by 889% in one yearhttps://www.presspage.com/news/how-ohiohealth-increased-their-newsroom-coverage-by-889-in-one-year/
https://www.presspage.com/news/how-ohiohealth-increased-their-newsroom-coverage-by-889-in-one-year/ The healthcare organization's editorial philosophy and communications workflow is a stellar example of how to run your organization's online newsroom. Two years ago, OhioHealth, a not-for-profit, faith-based healthcare system in Ohio, switched their newsroom over to PressPage. Within the first year, their total viewership jumped from 11,588 visits in 2015 to 114,697 visits the next full year on their new PressPage newsroom. That is a meteoric 889% increase!

(NOTE: This is part 1 of 2 of our interview with OhioHealth. You can read part 2 here.)

]]>While we would love to say our platform empowered OhioHealth to achieve such numbers, the real secret lies in the way their team restructured their PR workflow and the subsequent editorial philosophy they adopted for their newsroom.

Finding traditional news media harder and harder to reach in the modern age, OhioHealth saw an opportunity to showcase their internal communications stories alongside their media relations efforts to truly create a one stop shop brand journalism website. We spoke to Missy Gleason, the managing editor of the OhioHealth Newsroom, and Mark Hopkins, director of Media Relations to learn their secrets.

Your team won an award from PRSA this year for best online newsroom. Can you tell us a little more about that?

Missy Gleason: Our local PRSA had a call for entries. Since our newsroom with PressPage was a yearold, Mark and I sat down and looked at how much our newsroom had grown from the old site to the new PressPage newsroom. It’s kind of insane how much it grew.

Mark Hopkins: With our old newsroom there was a total of 11,588 hits in 2015. And we didn’t know whatthat meant - we just said “alright is that good, is that bad?” We didn't know.

In the following calendar year, with our new PressPage newsroom, we had 114,697 hits. So from 12k to 115k – that's how big it was. 889% increase in hits to be exact.

Missy: So what we really wanted to share for that PRSA entry, was the thought that went behind this. It wasn’t only that“we need a new newsroom.” The mission truly was to start brand journalism at OhioHealth.

Can you tell us a little about your old system of doing things before you built the OhioHealth newsroom?

Mark:This whole process goes back four years. Our team was doing all the traditional things thatmedia teams do – pitching stories and writing news releases. Slowly we were starting to see that the news media was changing. They had fewer resources and the world was going to the digital side. And we just had all these great stories but we ran out of places that could run them. You know there’s only so many reporters, there’s only so many news stations. So we started talking about developing our own content and videos while still pitching our stories.

But that’s kind of where we ran into trouble. We didn’t know what to do with it. So when we came across PressPage, that really was when the lightbulb went off and we said - we have this idea for content, and now we have an easy to use, attractive looking digital platform for our newsroom.

What is your approach to publishing content?

Missy:We have taken the newsroom and tried to make it a good gathering of different type of news that we have created ourselves. The number one source of content is still stories in traditional news media. We’ve just found a way to keep it more engaging and keep our viewers on our website. So as opposed to sending them away to a TV station’s website to watch the story, we are now able to embed those video links on our PressPage site, keeping our audience on OhioHealth.

The second thing we’ve done is utilize our own media relations team to produce content that might not have gotten placed in the media, or even stories we felt we could tell better than news media. The media team got trained on how to shoot videos, so when we come across a situation where a story didn’t get picked up, or we can give a little more context and flavor, we’ll produce our own version of that story as well.

And then we also have an internal newsletter, which used to just go out within our hospitals. But there were stories in there that were well worth sharing beyond our hospitals. So we now share those stories as well.

Mark:So stories that we can push out about our culture, about the things that we do aside from all theclinical stuff are valuable to us as well. And we’ll prepare it in a brand journalism way that doesn’t sound salesy or hokey. Media relations people are often told "just go get this in the news", but it is not always that easy. But we now have a platform where these stories can live and our associates can tell their grandma, "Hey go to OhioHealth's newsroom and see me in that story".

How does social media play into this?

Missy:Well this approach gives the social media team a lot more content that is produced by usand drives people back to our website. We have very, very strong associate engagement on social media. So whenever we’re able to share something about what we’re doing here at OhioHealth, that pride factor is so high with our associates, that they share it too. So our reach on social media goes much farther too.

Do you ever run out of content for the newsroom?

Missy: It’s our goal to publish something every day, Monday through Friday. Along with brandjournalism, we have a service called HealthDaythat provides news coming out in the healthcare world from current clinical studies. We find if there is something in the news that is drawing a lot of attention, but we at OhioHealth don’t have the time to turn a story around on it, we can still get that content from HealthDay.

Mark: The reality is that there are some days in there where you run out of stuff. So it really is a good way to supplement your other content.

What kind of stories do your viewers share the most?

Missy: They really run the gamut. We just posted a really cute story on our Facebook page about asewing guild at one of our local hospitals that madesuperhero capes for NICU babies,and within an hour we had upwards of 70 shares. So it’sbabies in capes. It’s ‘tug at your heartstrings', but also the pride factor of ‘we love what we do for our patients’.

But it's also big news like opening a new hospital, or clinical advancements and new treatments that we’re doing. There’s no silver bullet to what kind of story does well. It really depends on the strength of the story.

Do you find yourself focusing on stories that pull at the heartstrings a little?

Missy: I don’t think we focus on it more. I think it's something that comes naturally to us. We are anorganization that cares for our patients and their entire family. So I don’t think it's a deliberate strategy. Though we do joke about the old adage of ‘puppies and babies’ get great play. So you always know that you’re going to have a winner if you have a puppy or a baby in the story. But it’s not like we make it a strategy.

Mark: Actually, we’ve also used the newsroom as a mechanism to get news out that may be negative forus. We had an incident at one of our campuses, where our security officers were seen on camera during an altercation with a visitor. It looked really bad and we investigated the situation. It was a very big story here locally for a while. And we used the newsroom as a platform to share the messages from the president of that hospital. It was very effective being able to provide information in an open, honest and timely way that we could drive people to.

It sounds like you really treat your online newsroom like a news site.

Missy:I have a background in broadcast journalism. I would say that as the editor of the OhioHealthNewsroom, I really try to look at it from the perspective of - if this page was a news show, what would we want our audience to see? Sometimes it is stories that are important that we share and don't have to be specifically uplifting or emotional. It may be important that we either make our stance known on it, or it is something that will better serve our community, or it is news that they need to know.

My biggest driving factor is the benefit to the reader or viewer – it’s really the ’what’s in it for me’ factor. It’s not us tooting our own horn, it’s truly trying to find out what our audience is going to want to know.

(NOTE: This is part 1 of 2 of our interview with OhioHealth. You can read part 2 here.)

]]>SaaS,PressPage,News,client,healthcare,newclient,CaseTue, 05 Sep 2017 09:54:19 -0500The University of Manchester: “People actually want to share the content now”https://www.presspage.com/news/the-university-of-manchester-people-actually-want-to-share-the-content-now/
https://www.presspage.com/news/the-university-of-manchester-people-actually-want-to-share-the-content-now/How PressPage helped The University of Manchester migrate their archive and optimize their PR practicesThe University of Manchester has seen a dramatic increase in social media traffic since they started using their PressPage newsroom. The most substantial advantage, however, has to do with the day-to-day operations: "The biggest benefit of working with this platform is how easy it is to use."
]]>The University of Manchester is the UK’s largest single site university with almost 40,000 students, and is also one of the world’s top research universities, with 25 Nobel Prize winners having worked or studied there. Jamie Brown, News & Media Relations Manager, oversees a team that is responsible for the day-to-day contact with journalists and promoting news about the University’s research and students. He also manages the online newsroom, which needed an update three years ago when he started at The University of Manchester.

Publishing stories was really time-consuming

Jamie: “For a number of years we had been using a CMS that we had developed ourselves. With this old CMS, it was really time-consuming to publish stories. But in addition to that it had limited multimedia options. We were looking for a solution which would enable us to more easily publish news stories with rich media such as video and photos, which can easily be shared via social media.” When looking into the solution that PressPage offered them, it seemed like a good fit: “We had strict brand guidelines and security guidelines, but all of those requirements were dealt with really professionally.”

Migrating seven years of history

There was a bit of a challenge: The University of Manchester wanted to migrate approximately seven years of stories (their archive consisted of more than 6,000 stories in total). “Although it seemed like a challenge, everything was migrated easily. Since the PressPage platform is so easy to use, it was quite easy to train other people within our team to use it. During this implementation our dedicated customer success manager responded quickly whenever there was an issue.”

Ease of use and flexibility

Overall Jamie is very happy with how the platform works for them. “The biggest benefit of working with this platform is how easy it is to use. We’ve trained people very quickly across different teams. It’s really flexible and people actually want to share the content now, which they didn’t before. Social media traffic to our website has dramatically increased, more people than ever before are reading the news articles and they’re staying on pages for longer.

One of the other pluses is that the news releases can be enriched with all sorts of media. “You can add a video, add an image gallery or even social media sharing options. Using PressPage saves us a lot of time in creating better releases and publishing them.”

Collaboration with PressPage

Jamie does not talk about a supplier, but about a partner. “Collaboration has been key to the success of this project. Not only does PressPage always respond quite quickly, we can also feed ideas in and we’ve noticed those ideas are coming back and being adopted on the platform. That’s really helped us to put our own ideas forward.”

Of course it does not stop here, there are also improvements to be made for The University of Manchester. Jamie notes: “We have seen the effect of the scientific community on Reddit, which made us think that we should do more with that platform. But also we want to incorporate our online magazine into our newsroom, to enrich the type of stories that are now being posted.”

]]>Newsroom,SaaS,PressPage,Case,news,NewClient,educationWed, 05 Jul 2017 05:00:02 -0500The whole news publication process has become faster and more efficient for Daimlerhttps://www.presspage.com/news/the-whole-news-publication-process-has-become-faster-and-more-efficient-for-daimler/
https://www.presspage.com/news/the-whole-news-publication-process-has-become-faster-and-more-efficient-for-daimler/When the old system for creating and publishing press releases was terminated, several local Daimler offices were presented with the challenge of not having an up to date system for their PR teams. Daimler Poland was among the offices who seized the opportunity and opted for a new tool, which made publishing news to their website a lot easier and less time consuming . “Now we don’t have to wait when a press release is published, it is published to the website immediately.”
]]>Looking forward to self driving cars, reliable green options and other huge developments in the near future, the Automotive industry is fast growing and ever-changing. For brands within the automotive industry, such as Daimler, it is important to have a stable presence in the media and to ensure that information about the brand is easily accessible. Jaroslaw Morawski: “Journalists don’t have time to spend searching on the website to check if new articles are published online.”

Totally outdated

Daimler's realization that their old media platform was insufficient to their needs led them to seek other solutions. It was ‘totally outdated’ and needed to be replaced with a new platform. Morawski: “The old system was not intuitive and it was complicated.” Although all options for a new system were arranged for the global sites, local offices needed find their own solution. With Daimler Poland looking for a new tool, PressPage offered the solution.

Jaroslaw Morawski, responsible for ecommerce & CRM within Mercedes-Benz Trucks Poland, is supporting his colleagues with the creation of press releases. He trains them in using PressPage and, if needed, helps with publishing the releases via the platform. Morawski: “In the old system, we needed to undertake a lot of manual steps. Publishing a press release took a lot of time and mistakes were easily made.”

Time saver

Compared to the old system, Morawski sees lots of positive changes through using PressPage. “Before I needed transfer the articles from the corporate website one by one and check if these had the same layout. With PressPage, the releases we post are automatically shown on the homepage and through the use of tags, we do not need to put all the articles into a category by hand.” For Daimler Poland the biggest advantage is the ease of creating a press release in the system. “We were used to doing a lot of things manually, such as connecting the releases to the navigation, assigning them to specific categories and individually uploading each and every picture. Now we can easily create a release and publish it directly our website.“

The publication workflow has become faster and more efficient, due to the intuitive interface and flexibility of the platform. Morawski: “What is also important for us is that our newsroom matches with the corporate identity. The template of the Daimler Poland newsroom is similar to the Corporate Daimler Media site because the same look and feel has been applied. Now we do not need to spend time creating the layout for our own press releases in our newsroom. This enables us to be consistent in our appearance online.”

Keep improving

Although using PressPage has led to an optimized publication process, Daimler Poland continues searching for opportunities to improve their main communication platform. Morawski: “One of the things we are looking at is PressPage Mail, so that we can proactively inform journalists about new press releases that are published. Although we are already using Twitter and other social media to communicate, sending notifications via email would be a nice addition to our current process.”

The biggest advantage of using PressPage compared to the old system is the time spent to publish a press release. The newsroom being shown in the same look & feel as the corporate website, was one of the reasons to implement a new system. “We don’t need to spend time to manually create the layout of the press release.” Morawski and his colleagues are very happy with the time saved using this new platform. “Here the system automatically publishes the whole package. Our colleagues are all satisfied, we only have positive comments.”

Below you can the previous newsroom (left) and how the current newsroom looks like (right).

]]>news,case,NewClientThu, 15 Jun 2017 04:02:32 -0500California State University San Marcos: a textbook case of crisis preparationhttps://www.presspage.com/news/california-state-university-san-marcos-a-textbook-case-of-crisis-preparation/
https://www.presspage.com/news/california-state-university-san-marcos-a-textbook-case-of-crisis-preparation/“You never think your campus is going to be closed down because of a wildfire, but now we definitely know.”The 2014 Wildfire

Most communicators expect to have to deal with a crisis situation at some point in their career. Yet predicting how a crisis will rear its ugly head is incredibly difficult. While it is impossible to address every potential scenario, implementing a strong team and the right protocols can help effectively steer organizations out of crises.

As they dealt with a deluge of information coming in through one end, and questions from concerned parties from the other, the role of the PR team is a textbook case on how to handle crisis communications:

The team was immediately brought into a ‘Situation Room’, from where they accessed information and disseminated updates every three to five minutes during the first 18 hours of the crisis

The team positioned itself asthesource of information; positioning the PressPage news center as the only official university source for accurate and updated news

Katie Chappell, the social media specialist, monitored and posted on Twitter almost 24/7 for the first two days, proactively providing updates, dispelling false information, and answering panicked questions from concerned students and families

Yet more impressive than the team’s quick response to the crisis, was the textbook crisis management preparation CSUSM undertook following the wildfire incident.

Crisis preparations following the Wildfire

Prior to the wildfire, only one member of the CSUSM staff, the Public Information Officer, had undergone crisis training.

Following the crisis, CSUSM put every member of the crisis team, including the four key members of the PR department through crisis management training workshops. Together with other members of the crisis response team, including college facilities and university police, CSUSM staff ran simulations of potential crisis scenarios.

“It was really fascinating because we were divided into teams and given an emergency. And we had to both act out and write down what we would do in our role. I had to write a press release in three minutes, and also a series of tweets and website updates. In the last session we came together and discussed the issues that came up that needed to be solved, so we could address those in advance of an actual campus emergency”.

In addition to simulation exercises across the crisis response team, the PR team also formalized their own internal processes in preparation for crises. “Now we have pre-written messages and press releases in the event of most campus emergencies. The statements have been vetted and approved by the university leadership and would only need slight updates if they were ever needed.”

Download a 5-Step-Guide to do a dry run for your crisis communications.

All members of the PR team were also given extensive training, including press interviews, social media, and PressPage.

“We definitely all feel like we are as prepared as we could be now”, said Katie, explaining that they now feel well versed in “how and what we’re doing during crises, where we keep the assets related to emergencies, like a big yellow triangle with a red background that we use in any news release that is related to an emergency situation.”

Finally, Katie adds that the PR team were all given extensive cross-training of each other's roles, “so that in the case of emergencies any one of us could do the others job, and that includes using PressPage. We have all our individual roles in the event we’re all here, but also have the ability to take over for each other if we are not”.

The impact of preparation

Since the wildfires, the CSUSM team has had two instances where it used its new crisis management strategies.

Exactly one year after the wildfires shut down CSUSM for a week during commencement, mother nature struck again, and the university was again forced to close down on the day of commencement due to a severe thunderstorm.

“Postponing the commencement ceremony again – two years in a row – is a pretty huge deal,” explains Katie. “So while we didn’t have the same immediate emergency communications, we were able to immediately implement our plan that we had created in the event we have to postpone commencement, especially related to weather.”

With over 10,000 people traveling to attend the commencement ceremony, the CSUSM public relations team had just three days notice to alert people that proceedings would be postponed. But with the learning experience from the year before, as well as its formalized crisis communications collateral including press releases, tweets, and b-roll, CSUSM was able to swiftly and decisively address the issue. In communicating to its internal audience of students, faculty, and families, as well as to the media, the team was prepared for what to say, and what the feedback was going to be. “We were able to answer some questions before they were even asked,” Katie adds.

The result of this preparation was a smooth overall process, with both the school’s internal audience and the media knowing what to expect. “Once we sent out the initial notification, pretty much every major media company in San Diego easily picked up the story from our news center that our commencement ceremony was rescheduled. We had set the expectation for where people could find information, and where we would be updating it. It was a much much smoother process from our perspective.”

Summing up the result of their preparation, Katie concludes, “fewer phone calls, fewer panicked people, and the media knew where to go”.

Increased trust

Apart from the calming effects of deep preparedness, a clear crisis communications strategy has led to longer term reputational benefits for CSUSM.

“We have established ourselves, not only during emergencies, but just in general, asthesource of information, and that we also provide accurate information as quickly as possible.”

Are you curious to see how an online newsroom could support your PR strategy? Request a free 14-day trial to try it out.

]]>Newsroom,SaaS,PressPage,Case,news,crisis,educationSat, 06 May 2017 03:03:41 -0500KLM Newsroom: from 1.0 to 3.0https://www.presspage.com/news/klm-newsroom-from-10-to-a-30/
https://www.presspage.com/news/klm-newsroom-from-10-to-a-30/How PressPage’s newsroom technology enabled KLM to communicate faster, more efficiently and more cost effectively. The PressPage newsroom not only increased traffic to KLM’s news pages, it also improved their workflow. By creating more efficiency and speeding up the publication process considerably, KLM were empowered to react to events and crises quickly and decisively.
]]>KLM’s communications team was growing increasingly discontent with the Content Management System (CMS) they were working with to publish news to their native newsroom. “Within KLM there was a corporate mentality, resulting in a workflow with little flexibility. Platforms that were chosen at the time were functioning satisfactorily, but changes in the communications industry were so drastic that we felt we were lagging behind”, says Lars van Straten, Online Communications & Reputation Specialist at KLM. “The CMS was well suited for regular corporate communications, but fell short when something had to be published instantly. We were no longer able to do what was expected from us.”

“We could not publish content as quickly as we wanted because press releases were placed in a publication queue”, Lars continues. “We wanted to work in a cost-efficient way with a better workflow. We wanted to increase our publishing speed and share content through our existing social media channels. I then took it upon myself to pursue a solution through which we could disseminate news when and where we wanted to.”

Better workflow thanks to PressPage

The introduction to PressPage’s platform four years ago, proved to be the solution KLM was looking for. Lars: ‘The big step forward meant going from a 1.0 to a 3.0 situation. “With PressPage it’s ‘publish as you speak’. Within our new workflow, publishing press releases has become something numerous colleagues are able to do. We’re no longer dependent on third parties; everything is published directly in the newsroom and subsequently shared through our social media channels.” Lars and his communications team are also excited about their collaboration with the PressPage team. “They are a great help. We really appreciate the personal contact and their professional drive. If there is an issue or room for improvement, PressPage picks up on this immediately. This way, we learn a lot from each other and keep each other focussed.”

Emergency situations

In case of emergency situations, it’s crucial to be able to quickly issue news releases, Lars explains. “Thanks to the scalability of the platform, we know that in case of a crisis we can continue publishing without having to worry that the site will not be accessible or that it will go offline. That is quite relieving, especially in a time of crisis when things are already stressful.”

Results

It is the result that counts, and in this regard too, KLM is very pleased with PressPage. The use of the newsroom platform has provided the airliner with a growing number of visitors. “We’ve especially experienced a significant increase in the use of our RSS-feed”, Lars explains. “KLM hopes to continue this upward trend with continuous improvements to the newsroom. We have already made great progress with the look and feel and have gradually adjusted the newsroom to our needs. The reactions have been very positive.”

In looking for continuous improvements to the newsroom when it comes to functionality, usability, and performance, Lars finds PressPage to be a valued partner. ‘The platform is continually optimised and there is a roadmap we are given access to. This gives us something to hold on to, it helps us realize when we have to make adjustments.’

]]>Newsroom,SaaS,PressPage,Case,news,AviationTue, 14 Mar 2017 12:00:56 -0500‘Looking back and analyzing instead of frantically pushing on’https://www.presspage.com/news/looking-back-and-analyzing-instead-of-frantically-pushing-on/
https://www.presspage.com/news/looking-back-and-analyzing-instead-of-frantically-pushing-on/After the merger between BNN and VARA, the new broadcasting organization installed a newsroom to meet the changing demands of journalists. Creating the appropriate environment for BNN-VARA’s dual brand policy took quite some time and effort.
]]>Even though the two broadcasters have been merged, both BNN and VARA retain their own DNA. Both have their own website for their respective target audiences. And until recently, their press websites were also separated, which eventually caused difficulties.

‘We received more and more questions from journalists who could not find the information they were looking for’, said Thijs Verheij, Interim Head of Communications at BNN-VARA. ‘After the merger the journalists expected to find BNN information on the VARA press website and the other way around. If you hear that too often, you know that something needs to change. Moreover, the journalists informed us that they would like to have the news and program content offered in a different way: searchable by broadcasting day instead of the publishing date. The contact details for each program needed to be more apparent as well.’

Make or buy

BNN-VARA ran into a typical, but relevant PR question: can we develop the newsroom ourselves or should we buy a ready-made product? Consultation with the IT department showed that building it ourselves would result in a long and very costly and lengthy project. ‘I checked with some some of our colleagues in the business and found out that a lot of them used a PressPage newsroom,’ Verheij said. ‘The PressPage solution seemed to offer everything we were looking for and it seemed to be less expensive and faster to implement, which made for an easy decision.’

The dual brand strategy did produce a number of challenges and requests. Verheij: ‘We wanted to be able to clearly mark items belonging to BNN or VARA. Based on this request, PressPage developed a number of new modules to make this possible. Although this took some effort, they managed to realize it quite quickly. The calendar module was also adjusted to match our needs. The newsroom right now is exactly as we want it to be.’

Monitor and Analyze

Verheij and his team are still fine-tuning the communication mix. ‘In addition to producing content, we also need to look at distribution and analysis. At the moment we are examining what is the best way for sending our mailings. The introduction of PressPage Mail allows us to send email campaigns, which simplifies the process, and we are considering a collaboration with Smart.pr for selecting and creating press lists. Using the Clipit monitoring tool in combination with the Analytics in PressPage, we’re able to get a clear view of the results of our efforts.

When looking at data, Verheij sees an important area of improvement for BNN-VARA’s communication strategy and practices. ‘We want to spend more time looking back and analyzing results instead of frantically pushing on with our current path. We are always working on the next project, but evaluating previous ones is very beneficial as well. We should dive into the results, draw conclusions based on data and adapt our strategy accordingly. Data from sources like PressPage and Clipit definitely help.’

]]>cases,news,CaseSat, 18 Feb 2017 03:06:02 -0600Gone are the days we had to wake the web editor at 6 a.mhttps://www.presspage.com/news/gone-are-days-we-have-to-wake-the-web-editor-at-6-am/
https://www.presspage.com/news/gone-are-days-we-have-to-wake-the-web-editor-at-6-am/How an international power utility got direct control over their content publication process.Eneco is one of the largest producers and suppliers of natural gas, electricity and heat in the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, France and Belgium serving more than 2 million business and residential customers.
]]>Eneco’s communications team wanted to be able to enrich their online publications and publish independently from their IT department and/or webteam. PressPage proved to be the solution they were looking for.

Eneco is a clear example of an organization running into the limitations of its own website with regard to news dissemination. Their native newsroom was a rather unattractive part of the corporate website. ‘I was just a list of clickable titles, leading to text-only webpages, sometimes accompanied by a small picture’, says Marcel van Dun, spokesperson for Eneco.

News- and press releases had to be published by his colleagues at the web editing department.

Alternatives to native newsroom

The native newsroom was subsequently replaced by another platform. ‘We were starting to produce more enriched and consumer-oriented content, using an external platform, which had limitations of its own’, Van Dun looks back. ‘For example, the summary of an article had a maximum number of characters, while annual figures cannot be trimmed down this way. This made a complete transition to the external platform impossible.’

Around that time, Van Dun came into contact with PressPage. Their fully integrated newsroom offered more options and allowed for an easy transition. Van Dun: ‘With PressPage, we are able to schedule, publish and edit everything ourselves. We don’t have to wake the web editor at 6 a.m. anymore.’

Greater reach

Eneco’s newsroom now has tons of press releases and timely content, enriched with images, videos, infographics, contact information and share buttons for social media. ‘The image bank is particularly convenient’, Van Dun feels. ‘All graphic content is automatically saved here. Journalists can use it of their own accord and find high resolution photos and videos.’

Newly published content is automatically shared through Twitter, which makes for a greater reach than the standard body of journalists and corporate relations. ‘Our Twitter account has a lot of influential followers who regularly retweet our messages. This introduces our content to a whole new group of readers.’

Great cooperation

Van Dun is very satisfied with the current state of affairs. The newsroom has already acquired an important role as an archive and reference work. ‘The newsroom is also well-read within our own organization. The platform has a preview module that allows us to show our colleagues what our content will look like.’

Van Dun is also very pleased with his cooperation with the PressPage team. ‘We rarely have any problems with the system, and when we do, the PressPage team is always quick to respond. They really contribute in solving problems and optimizing features and complete all action items very quickly.’

]]>Eneco,Case,Power,UtilitiesSun, 15 Jan 2017 09:59:00 -0600Fontys: ‘Content is more important than traditional marketing’https://www.presspage.com/news/fontys-content-is-more-important-than-traditional-marketing/
https://www.presspage.com/news/fontys-content-is-more-important-than-traditional-marketing/In Fontys Hogescholen’s communications strategy, the role of content is growing at a steady pace. The transition to a new newsroom enabled thebroad-based collegeto reach a larger audience.
]]>The largest educational organization in the southern part of the Netherlands derived its name from the word ‘Fons’, which is Latin for source. Fontys Hogescholen likes to position itself as the source of knowledge for its more than 44,000 students. The organization has an active communication policy, wanting to reach not only the students but also employees, potential students and regional professionals. “Of course we publish news articles about education, but we also write a lot about research and innovation”, says Erwin Hoeks, Press and PR consultant. In addition, student projects and activities receive regular attention.

Fontys likes to interact with its readers and maintains an active presence on social media via LinkedIn (100,000 followers), Twitter (11,000) and Facebook (10,000). “We use our online newsroom as the main source of content for both LinkedIn and Twitter”, Hoeks explains. “On Facebook we publish more light and playful news with fun videos et cetera, specifically aimed at our students.”

Transition

Within the online newsroom, developed by PressPage, about 25 to 30 articles are published per month, enriched with visual materials and other downloadable files. Before the transition to PressPage, this level of frequency was not possible. Hoeks: ”We worked with two different systems for the intranet and Internet. Articles which were meant for both, had to be published twice. Now we are able to control both our platforms from one system, and distribute the articles directly through social media. Our activity within these channels has increased enormously.”

Fontys has used the efficiency gains to publish more articles, which has since been resulting in more followers on the social channels and more visits to the newsroom. “We now think differently about how and what we want to publish”, says Hoeks. “Publishing an article used to be a burden, but with the ease of PressPage we are looking at this differently. The newsroom now plays a more important role within our communications strategy.”

Strategy

Hoeks acknowledges that his team could do more to reach the full potential of the PressPage platform. “We can do a lot more with it, and we do want to make better use of these functionalities in the coming year. For example, we currently make little use of custom pages, which make it real easy to create separate environments within the newsroom. And at the moment our media library is mostly just used as storage, so there’s room for a better structure there. We don’t always make use of the automated texts our sharing buttons are able to generate, and we’re just starting to look into the calendar function.”

Content is becoming an increasingly important part of Fontys’ communications strategy. “It’s clear our approach is successful and contributes in engaging our target audiences. The newsroom plays a big part in this. Nowadays, content may be more important than traditional marketing tools like advertising and commercials; people tend to see right through those. It’s about sharing your organization’s stories, and using the right tools to do so.”

]]>cases,fontys,case,NewClient,educationMon, 05 Dec 2016 03:57:00 -0600The role of an online newsroom in press release distributionhttps://www.presspage.com/news/the-role-of-an-online-newsroom-in-press-release-distribution/
https://www.presspage.com/news/the-role-of-an-online-newsroom-in-press-release-distribution/It’s a cliché at this point, but nonetheless true: Media organizations are short-staffed, which means they’re always on the lookout for rich, multimedia content. Luckily for media outlets, PR can offer the stories and immersive experiences that audiences crave. From writing the perfect subject line to using innovative digital methods of distribution, attendees gained a powerful understanding of the current state of the press release.
]]>PressPage's North American Sales Director, Tom Gubbins, participated in an in-depth look at what it really takes to get your press release picked up in today’s hectic media landscape.

Together with three other veteran media relations professionals, he shared his know-how in placing stories in media outlets whose gatekeepers are strapped for time and have even less patience for a sloppy press release.

Tom gave attendees an interesting take on how an online newsroom can be a very effective tool for press release distribution, amplification and conversion.

Newsroom ROI

In the case of Marathon Petroleum, their newsroom analytics show that 15-20 percent of the people exposed to a given post follow through to the newsroom, and they spend an average of 1.5 to 2.1 minutes reading the press release. Plus, readers are compelled to explore the rest of the site.

For H&R Block, the yield from their newsroom has also increased. In January this year, overall sessions were up 12.35 percent compared with the same month in 2015. All engagement numbers have increased, among them sessions, page views and time spent on the site.

Speaker tips

Some smart pointers of the other professionals that contributed to thier thoughts included:

Find out just how easy it can be to transform your current news site into a dynamic tool that targets your message to the people you need to reach. Please complete the following form to receive a copy of theEssentials for a Stellar Online Newsroomwhite paper.

]]>Newsroom,PressPage,press release,Case,ROIThu, 19 May 2016 15:05:06 -0500University's digital newsroom an oasis in 'a media desert'https://www.presspage.com/news/universitys-digital-newsroom-an-oasis-in-a-media-desert/
https://www.presspage.com/news/universitys-digital-newsroom-an-oasis-in-a-media-desert/Governors State University in south suburban Chicago long languished with little interest from journalists. A new content strategy and its PressPage platform are changing that.
]]>If you handle PR for an organization of any size, you probably know the feeling: You have a dynamic story to tell, but little to no luck in interesting the press. The problem is compounded at Governors State University, a south suburban Chicago institution whose 5,500-student enrollment might attract journalists in most other markets. Sitting 40 miles outside of major urban area filled with colleges, however, Governor's State tends to get overlooked by TV camera crews and newspaper reporters seeking a story.

"We're in a really weird location in terms of media market," says Keisha Dyson, assistant vice president of marketing and communications. "We're actually in a media desert, and we have very limited resources. We have a very small staff." This year, Governors State is seeing results from a new content strategy with the launch of its new digital newsroom. The site is run on PressPage software, which eases posting and social media sharing. "Before, we didn't have anything," Dyson says. "We did not have a newsroom. This is baseline data for us, which is why we're thrilled, because before we were getting no attention."

Student article wins coverage

Take, for example, a student rally in March in a state beset by a budget impasse. Until 2015, the university didn't even use social media, and its main channel to spread the word was an e-newsletter, says Dyson, the author of the new content strategy. In January, however, Governors State launched its digital newsroom, so there was a platform where it could give the story some legs.

It wasn't an easy task. Students at colleges much closer to the urban center were also hosting rallies. Governors State's two-person comms team drove its own story by posting a graduate student's article on its platform and notifying reporters with whom the college had built a relationship.

"Similar to your civic duty to vote, you should consider this your civic duty as a student at GSU," Matt Gentry wrote. "The gravity of the budget crisis for GSU is hard to understate, and the ramifications are especially real for those that expect to graduate after May 2017."

A newsroom story on how Canada geese were nesting at the university also took off in local newspapers and on TV news broadcasts. Maybe statements such as this helped drive interest: "When geese feel threatened, they will typically charge humans from behind striking them with their wing or beak."

"We got insane coverage of our geese, and that was the result of PressPage," Dyson says. "We put what was considered an internal story up on PressPage and it became a regional news sensation." For a communications shop that didn't have any previous data to benchmark itself against, this was all rather exciting.

'Own our own stories'

"We believe we should own our own stories," Dyson says. "We believe that from this office, we tell the very best stories that are coming out of our university."

With two people, the university can tell just five or six really good stories a week externally, Dyson says.

"I can't say that we've convinced [journalists] to tell the story we want them to tell," Dyson says. "What I can say is that we owned our own story and we've told our own story. And in some instances, we've had members of the Chicago media retweet our stories."

Another story that PressPage turned into a hit was an announcement that its board was freezing tuition, despite the uncertainty of state finances. That won coast-to-coast coverage, from San Francisco to Washington.

"That story got picked up by the Associated Press, and it spread like wildfire," Dyson says. "That's a great example of something that would have been traditionally ignored."

'Professor Fraud'

The platform allows the university to highlight interesting experts. A faculty interview just posted features Bill Kresse, assistant professor of accounting, who goes by the name Professor Fraud and has been featured everywhere from The Washington Post to PBS.

The prof, who harbors a fascination for shysters, "has shared a drink at the Ritz with Frank Abagnale, one of the most notorious con men and impostors of the late 20th century," the university reports. "He's rubbed elbows with Frank Sinatra, and he was mentored and befriended by Judge Abraham Lincoln Marovitz, the only federal judge to sit on the bench without going to college.

"Fraud creates this continuous battle of wits between those who are trying to separate us from our money and those of us who are trying to prevent them from doing that," Kresse says. "So it's a marvelous puzzle that keeps changing and manipulating, and it really gets the imagination sparked."

PressPage has also enabled the communications team to begin measuring the success of the stories and adjusting coverage of the campus accordingly. "We're using SEO strategy to expand our storytelling," says Dyson.

]]>Newsroom,SaaS,PressPage,Case,Educational,NewClientMon, 02 May 2016 15:42:10 -0500Making your newsroom newsworthyhttps://www.presspage.com/news/making-your-newsroom-newsworthy/
https://www.presspage.com/news/making-your-newsroom-newsworthy/How to earn credibility with your audience and journalists.At Ragan's 4th Annual Social Media Conference for PR, Marketing and Corporate Communications at Disney World, Jeff Calaway and Kim Griffith --from Cook Children's Health Care System-- provided great insight on how to make your online newsroom... a newswothry online resource. Especially with a small staff.
]]>Cook Children's has made its newsroom an online destination for not only parents, but the industry and media. The Fort Worth (TX) based hospital even helped one family make the decision to fly in from Detroit for surgery after reading a story on Checkupnewsroom.com.

The brand journalism strategy has changed the way the nonprofit hospital handles news; the hospital no longer must go hat in hand to reporters and beg for coverage. The new PressPage software allowed communicators to take charge of the site without relying on IT. "We're a very small staff," Calaway says. "But I can post myself now, and it takes a matter of minutes to get it out there."

Analytics help prove the value of the brand journalism site to skeptical staffers. Calaway says: "I've had a pediatrician going, 'Does anybody actually read this?' And so when you can come back and say, 'This story was read by 120,000 people or 50,000 people or even 3,000 people,' it's big, because it shows that people are actually getting the information."

It even becomes a stronger case when the local county public health authorities (TCPH) contacted the editorial staff at Checkupnewsroom.com to publish theirannouncementthat the Zica virus had been confirmed in Terrant County.It really proves the fact that Cook Children’s brand journalism site is a legitimate news source that has gained enourmous reach in less than 24 months.

So, how have they come this far? How have they gained such a large audience with a returning rate (= loyal audience) of over 89%?

Key take-aways

Some of the key take-aways for anewsworthy newsroompresented by Jeff Calaway and Kim Griffith are:

Editorial news

They hold their editorial meetings early in the morning to coincide with the process of the local media’s editorial meetings. Key aspects of this approach are to discuss:

What is the news or what is tending? Locally and across the world.

Who will be the best source?

Deadline?

Other elements to consider include format:

Infographics

Video

Images

Find your voice

What can your experts (doctors) contribute to the conversation?

The key - say what no one else is saying.

The goal: tell a story with a new and newsworthy hook.

Be a credible source

Do not PR yourself to death. Leave the ‘horn’ at home.

Find a champion.

Do not shy away from the controversial topics.

The champion at Cook Children’s is Dr Justin Smith, better known as @TheDocSmitty. He even has his ownsectionon the newsroom.

Speak the media’s language

Kimberly Griffith thought she would be sending out press releases everyday, but she does not.

Give them intelligent, authoritative, inspirational and ready to re-print stories.

Media relationship is best through Twitter (link to the newsroom story).

The Hub and spoke approach

The newsroom has become the origin and destination of their content. Using the community, media, social media and the e-newsletter as both sources and magnifiers of the news.

]]>Newsroom,SaaS,PressPage,Case,Checkupnewsroom.com,brand journalism,content,eventFri, 11 Mar 2016 08:29:59 -0600How to establish a social media culture at conservative or highly-regulated companieshttps://www.presspage.com/news/how-to-establish-a-social-media-culture-at-conservative-or-highly-regulated-companies/
https://www.presspage.com/news/how-to-establish-a-social-media-culture-at-conservative-or-highly-regulated-companies/Newsroom plays key role in adopting social media strategy for Fortune 25 company.At Ragan's 4th Annual Social Media Conference for PR, Marketing and Corporate Communications at Disney World, Brandon Daniels --communications manager at Marathon Petroleum Corporation (MPC)-- revealed some great take-aways from his social media journey at a highly regulated company.
]]>Marathon Petroleum Corporation (MPC) is a Fortune 25 company that's been in business for nearly 130 years. For this traditional-minded company in a closely-regulated industry, launching social media required a significant culture shift. Now, just a year after starting this new venture, MPC has produced measurable social media results. Its social media have grown beyond customer engagement into recruiting, marketing, advocacy, and community support.

A key asset in MPC’s social media strategy is theirnewsroom. And so far, it has delivered some amazing results. The newsroom launched early last year and coincided with Marathon Petroleum's rollout of its social media endeavors. The company quickly garnered 3,000 followers on Facebook, and 34,000 on LinkedIn.

In the past, a petroleum company or its PR agency might have had to lean on reporters to get a mention of the importance of oil products in feeding billions of people. With the growing exposure they now have on different social channels, they are able to publish directly to their key audiences without gatekeepers.

Its newsroom analytics show that 15-20 percent of the people exposed to a given post follow through to the newsroom, and they spend an average of 1.5 to 2.1 minutes reading the article. Plus, people are going on to explore the rest of the site.

Daniels says, "That's a higher level of engagement than we ever would have appreciated or understood prior to the newsroom."

Key take-aways

Brandon’s presentation traced the transformation of a company that once avoided social media into one that embraces every aspect of social media. The key lessons are:

How to generate support for social media

Build your case: Make it easy to digest, but hard to counter.

Research: Do your research and compare to competitor activities

Find allies: Find out who would benefit from social within your organization and bring them into your team. Sales? HR?

Worst case scenarios: Explore what can go wrong if you engage in social media. But also look at what we are missing if you do not.

Be the poster child: Every successful project needs an ambassador. If you want it to succeed, you must make sure you support this to the fullest.

How to build an approval-ready strategy

Scope: How will you start? Best is to start with one network and slowly build it out to other networks

Budgets: Social media is free. But there are many things you can buy that will help you. So make sure you know what investments you will need.

Content strategy: Where is the content coming from? Who is making it? It must be sustainable.

Crisis plan: make sure you have a crisis plan in place for the most likely scenarios.

Success benchmarks: What needs to happen to justify existence of social activities

Marathon tries its best to provide content that meets the expectations of its audiences. For example, Marathon’s largest group of organic social followers comes from LinkedIn (34,500); providing the content creators a great insight in what type of content the larger part of their audience is looking for.This allows them to do well with content made for this distribution channel. Considering the average engagement rate being between 0.5 - 1.0%, MPC’s content on LinkedIn scores well averaging of 5% per post.

Marathon uses a hub and spoke approach. The hub being their newsroom, and the spokes being their social channels. This approach does well in posting snippets of content on social channels with the intention of redirecting audiences away from these channels back to their hub (read: newsroom). On the newsroom the Marathon team is able to better measure engagement; they have seen the average time spent reading articles increase from 1.15 minutes to 2.10 minutes.

]]>Newsroom,SaaS,PressPage,Case,MPC,Marathon Petroleum,Fortune 25,content,social mediaThu, 10 Mar 2016 15:14:10 -0600Company makes its case with newsroomhttps://www.presspage.com/news/company-makes-its-case-with--newsroom/
https://www.presspage.com/news/company-makes-its-case-with--newsroom/The role of petroleum in feeding the world. A volunteer mentoring effort at a high school. A gas station rebranding. Marathon Petroleum uses website to connect with people and offer its views.As the Paris Climate Change Conference heated up in November, it was hard to find anyone willing to put in a kind word about fossil fuels. Even automakers such as Nissan sought to position themselves on the side of the angels by promoting their electric vehicle fleets.
]]>In the past, a petroleum company or its PR agency might have had to lean on reporters to get a mention of the importance of oil products in feeding billions of people. (Think of tractors, fertilizers and the energy required to pipe water for irrigation.)

This time around, Marathon Petroleum Corp. could make a direct pitch to the public by posting video on its newsroom of a speech by the author of a book called "The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels."

The newsroom launch early last year coincided with Marathon Petroleum's rollout of its social media endeavors. The company has garnered 3,000 followers on Facebook, and 34,000 LinkedIn users follow the company.

"We're putting stories out here that interest us," says Brandon Daniels, Marathon Petroleum's communications manager. "We're communicating directly with people who care, and the media tap into that in a very real way."

A brand journalism strategy allows the$98 billioncompany to set its own agenda for its external communications. The approach, however, is an extension of its internal communications, Daniels says.

Evolving from a newsletter

The petro producer long had an internal newsletter that went out to its 10,000 employees companywide, Daniels says. It helped get out the news to different parts of the organization: Someone who worked in a refinery in Catlettsburg, Kentucky, might otherwise never find out what's going on at a Robinson, Illinois, refinery—or with the engineering department. But if there's someone inspiring in one part of the company, others want to hear about him or her.

It dawned on Marathon Petroleum's staff of five communicators, however, that information it was sharing in the newsletter could be relevant to external stakeholders: shareholders, community members and families of employees and members of the Fourth Estate.

Marathon Petroleum posted a story on mentorship program that pairs its employees with high school sophomores in its headquarters town of Findlay, Ohio. It quoted a company official saying, ""These are students who have talent but perhaps need further direction."

Such stories once would have been limited to within Marathon Petroleum walls, with a few stray copies finding their way to school bulletin boards. Now it is publicly available—and Marathon Petroleum can easily leverage sharing from its newsroom.

"We were able to share that with the school directly, and the school then in turn shared that link," Daniels says. "Certainly the reach on that story went forward. And we were getting a lot of feedback in the local community based on that story."

Another storyhighlighted Marathon Petroleum's community celebrations of National 811 Day. This is a safety event reminding people that before digging on their property, they should call 811 in case there are buried utility lines.

Marathon Petroleum—which owns, leases or has an ownership stake in 8,300 miles of pipeline—has a clear interest in the topic. Marathon Petroleum hosted events for landowners and local emergency responders at minor league baseball games in New Orleans, Indianapolis and Louisville, Kentucky, giving guests free tickets and treating them to picnics during the games.

Gas station makeovers

Marathon Petroleum also posted gas station video (more interesting than you might think). The company has a branding agreement with 5,600 independent owners who run stations, and the company owns 2,760 Speedway locations. When the Speedway subsidiary acquired Hess retail locations, it had to convert those stations. Marathon Petroleum posted both an article about conversion and a time-lapse video of workers crazily changing signs and stripping off the old (off-brand colored) roofing.

If local reporters called to ask about the changeover of a local Hess station, Marathon Petroleum could send a link to the content. The article itself did not pick up media attention, but it helped answer journalists' questions, Daniels says.

The company did get interest in a story on recruiting.

Daniels says: "We had a couple of major news outlets reach out and say, 'Hey, we saw you published that story. Would you mind giving us some information on what it's like to recruit into your industry?'"

Its analytics show that 15-20 percent of the people exposed to a given post follow through to the site, and they spend an average of 1.5 minutes reading the article. Plus, people are going on to explore the rest of the site.

Daniels says, "That's a higher level of engagement than we ever would have appreciated or understood prior to the newsroom."

]]>Newsroom,SaaS,PressPage,Case,Marathon Petroleum,MPC,contentSat, 05 Mar 2016 00:00:00 -0600Newsroom software boosts sausage maker's PR and recruitinghttps://www.presspage.com/news/newsroom-software-boosts-sausage-makers-pr-and-recruiting/
https://www.presspage.com/news/newsroom-software-boosts-sausage-makers-pr-and-recruiting/Johnsonville Sausage uses PressPage for Web posts and social media sharing, boosting the reach of a cooking stunt and broadening the search for a multi-skilled spokesperson.Johnsonville Sausage is searching for a spokesperson of unusual qualifications. The ideal "bratcaster" candidate has a communications or theater degree, possesses marketing and emcee experience, and is willing to travel the country with a 26-ton sausage grill on wheels, talking up brats.
]]>How, though, does a company find a communicator person who can both ace TV interviews and offer cooking advice over a smoking grill? Johnsonville posted a video touting the position.

"This is your office," the company's retiring grill master, Ryan Allison, says in the video. "It's 55 feet long and weighs 53,000 pounds. ... You're going to attend some of the greatest events in the U.S., like the Kentucky Derby, NASCAR races, NFL games—you name it. You'll be there."

In three weeks the YouTube post has had more than 3,100 views—not bad for a recruitment video. The sausage-maker published and promoted the video with the help of PressPage, a newsroom software platform that integrates with websites and makes updates and social media sharing easy. (PressPage is a Ragan partner.)

"It's got to be easy for me to manage," says Stephanie Dlugopolski, manager of public relations and social media at Johnsonville. "I'm a one-person shop, so the more efficient I can be in getting that content live is key, and the more accessibility and sharing options that I can offer our visitors, that is also critical."

Flexible newsroom

Although a recruitment video isn't Johnsonville's usual fare, it does illustrate the flexibility of its newsroom. Dlugopolski's primary interest in developing a social media newsroom was that the company publishes a lot of content that might interest reporters and the general public.

"We are a fun social brand," Dlugopolski says. "We have a real strong connection to our consumers."

One fun promotion—a partnership with Uber-brought three Italian grandmothers ("nonnas," they are called) to Chicago in tiny houses on wheels and offered to deliver meals to lucky customers. ("Sausage Nonnas Sausaged Chicago!" Johnsonville's newsroom announced.) With PressPage it was easy to feed the social media sites that supported the event, Dlugopolski says.

The stunt was eye-catching enough to draw an article in Adweek, which also ran photos of the tiny houses scooting along a Chicago expressway, as well as videos of the cooking grannies.

"The stunt, orchestrated by Droga5, seems a little random, but the images of the nonnas in action are pretty amusing," AdWeek stated. "They delivered sausage rigatoni, lasagna or Italian sausage and meatballs, by the way."

(Well, maybe it only seems random if you've never had a home-cooked meal featuring Italian sausage.)

Publishing is no longer cumbersome

Publishing text, photos, three videos and other aspects of the stunt would have been a cumbersome process in the past-not a good thing in an Internet environment that demands immediate updates and social media sharing, Dlugopolski says.

"I did not have an option to upload visual content as well as regular content in a timely and simple manner," she says.

PressPage makes it easy for reporters and others to download images. The software makes social media sharing possible and provides analytics, so Dlugopolski can see what is and how to shape future content.

The metrics demonstrate what works online and what doesn't. "That helps me be smarter in terms of what kinds of content we put up in the future," Dlugopolski says.

"Sausage nonnas," for example, became one of Johnsonville's greatest online successes. That success is seen elsewhere on the website as well.

"We definitely have seen an increased level of traffic and in our news and also an increased level of shares," Dlugopolski says.

]]>Newsroom,Johnsonville,Case,NewClientWed, 10 Feb 2016 00:00:00 -0600H&R Block revamps digital newsroom and boosts website traffichttps://www.presspage.com/news/hr-block-revamps-digital-newsroom-and-boosts-website-traffic/
https://www.presspage.com/news/hr-block-revamps-digital-newsroom-and-boosts-website-traffic/Its new design supports a brand journalism strategy as journalists quote company experts and customers seek information on tax questions.Using PressPage and its brand journalism strategy, H&R Block has seen a boost in traffic to the site. In January this year, overall sessions were up 12.35 percent compared with the same month in 2015. All engagement numbers have increased, among them sessions, page views and time spent on the site.
]]>Let's say your hubby's in the hoosegow after an unsuccessful stickup of a corner market, and you're trying to figure out how to file your taxes.

As tax season arrives, H&R Block is using its newsroom to publish content that establishes its expertise and draws both reporters and consumers. Rather than a static collection of press releases, H&R Block's newsroom is luring potential customers and getting quotes from its experts into major publications.

"What we want to do is deliver relevant and timely content not just to the media but to consumers as well," says Gene King, director of corporate communications.

The tax preparer's newsroom is designed on software from PressPage. The design encourages sharing and is responsive to devices beyond the laptop, such as tablets and smartphones. PressPage enables communicators to easily share and upload posts, rather than relying on IT.

Traffic boost

Using the software and its brand journalism strategy, H&R Block has seen a boost in traffic to the site. In January this year, overall sessions were up 12.35 percent compared with the same month in 2015, King says. All engagement numbers have increased, among them sessions, page views and time spent on the site.

Recent H&R Block articles include a "Monday Mishap" column offering advice on what to do if you accidentally prepared your tax return with your last pay stub rather than a W-2. There's a questionnaire to help you determine whether you are at risk for identity theft, along with some good advice for avoiding such scams.

Among the risky behaviors are not only the rather obvious one of giving out your Social Security number over the phone, but also waiting until the deadline to file your income taxes. Procrastinators, beware: The first return in your name is assumed to be the accurate one, and you get the fun of fighting the IRS to reverse the fraudulent return.

"We know that consumers are coming to H&R Block because they need information about taxes and tax tips," King says. "So we have that content readily available for them as well."

As for the 14 cents an hour your husband accumulated producing license plates in the state pen, "The inmate's income earned while incarcerated does not qualify as earned income for the Child Tax Credit," H&R Block reports.

One H&R Block article was written by Mike Slack of The Tax Institute at H&R Block, which the company defines as a place "where credentialed tax experts use their knowledge and experience to benefit our clients, tax professionals and journalists." This offers a source for reporters when they seek expertise for articles leading up to April18filing deadline.

A recent NBC News story cited an H&R Block vice president of regulatory affairs who has also been featured on the company website.

The newsroom is also designed to be easily accessible on mobile devices. "We know our content is being viewed regularly and often on any device from anywhere," King says.

If the H&R Block newsroom is more like a publication than a repository of press releases, that's intentional. The company designed the site to break down topic areas into those similar to a news site, such as breaking news, corporate news, features and the blog page.

The goal is to provide timely, relevant content that taxpayers are eager to read and learn about.

"We know that consumers are coming to HRB because they need information about taxes and tax tips," King says, "so we have that content readily available for them as well."

"We really played that like a real news organization would," King says. "We wrote the story. We developed the story. We interviewed, and we actually did video on site moments after the winners were announced. Real time. Very relevant. And we looked at ourselves as our own news organization delivering news."

]]>Newsroom,Case,NewClientMon, 08 Feb 2016 00:00:00 -0600Hospital draws readers with rich storytelling and brand journalismhttps://www.presspage.com/news/hospital-draws-readers-with-rich-storytelling-brand-journalism/
https://www.presspage.com/news/hospital-draws-readers-with-rich-storytelling-brand-journalism/Six months after launching their integrated PressPage newsroom, news readership quadrupled compared to the stats of the native newsroom. The center's Facebook page grew by 16 percent, with a 52 percent increase in reach.
]]>When you represent a hospital specializing in brain and spinal cord injuries, it's not every day you have the opportunity to make the evening news.

That's why the Atlanta-based Shepherd Center has used a content strategy based in rich storytelling from its newsroom to catch the attention of new media outlets.

The newsroom is the center of the hospital's storytelling through articles, photos and videos. The strategy is amplified through social media and paid promotion via the content amplification platform Outbrain, says Jane M. Sanders, the hospital's associate director of public relations.

Perhaps it's natural that a hospital filled with heart-wrenching and inspiring stories would take a brand journalism approach.

The newsroom is run on PressPage software, which enables easy posting and social media sharing. The newsroom has had nearly 186,000 unique visits in this calendar year, a huge spike in traffic over last year, when it adopted the software.

Drawing journalists' interest

Not only is the newsroom informing potential patients and families, but it also drives inquiries by reporters.

"I just had one today from the local Fox affiliate," Sanders says. "This is the time of year when reporters are looking for copy to fill some holes for the holidays, when they have people out or they have a lot of air time to fill. So, we were able to give him two stories we published from our newsroom in the last couple months. It looks like they're going to do both of them."

Another story discussed how activity-based therapy, a neurological rehabilitation program, promotes functional improvement and lifelong wellness. It led with a description of the gym that houses Shepherd Center's Beyond Therapy.

Social media promotion

For Shepherd Center, a primary means of driving interest in stories is through social media, which also leads viewers back to the main hospital site.

"We get great engagement, especially when we include a video in a newsroom story," Sanders says. "Videos really drive people's interest, especially when we keep them short—under two minutes."

One recent video helped promote the hospital's mission of advocacy and community accessibility for people who use wheelchairs and other methods of navigation around the community. Shepherd Center posted a black-and-white video and music from 1928 to create a humorous newsreel to address etiquette when you encounter a wheelchair user in a doorway, whether it's interior, exterior or getting on and off an elevator.

"What we try to teach patients is that we want them to be as independent as possible," Sanders says. "If they're able to open a door for themselves, then we want them to be able to do that, and not have to depend on someone to be with them all the time."

The video was a hit, garnering more than 4,000 views.

Plugging content with Outbrain

Shepherd Center is amplifying content through Outbrain. The company places a photo and a link at the bottom of popular websites, driving traffic back to Shepherd Center through the hospital's own stories.

"Say you search for 'wheelchair,' and then you see down at the bottom, 'From around the Web,'" Sanders says. "You'll see a thumbnail and a short headline under it. That's typically promoted content that is either through Taboola or Outbrain."

The hospital pays $800 per month to promote two pieces of content, and it has seen its content placed on CNN, Fox News, the New York Post, Time magazine and other news sites. This has drawn 10,000 clicks to newsroom content and generated 1,000 sessions per month, Sanders says.

Outbrain makes sure that the stories have legitimate editorial content that could be useful to people and are not bald advertorials. Its editors even have refused to promote stories that they deemed too marketing-oriented.

Both strategies—the social media and the paid promotions—point back to the PressPage newsroom.

"The more I've worked in it," Sanders says, "the more I see that it does have multiple purposes to it."

Noting that U.K. recommendation was part of an international trend, the hospital jumped in on a health issue when it was making headlines. The story, which quoted a staff endocrinologist and pediatrician, once again demonstrated the effectiveness of the hospital's brand journalism site, Checkup Daily.

The brand journalism strategy has changed the way the nonprofit hospital handles news. The hospital no longer must go hat in hand to reporters and beg for coverage.

"Now we just tell our story," Calaway says. "We know that we're going to use our experts every time. We know that the information that's out there is going to be accurate."

Publishing without IT

For several years, Cook Children's has pursued a brand journalism strategy. Its blog was an award-winner, but it wasn't easy to make changes when a story broke, because communicators relied on the webmaster for updates.

"If there was something we wanted to get out quick," Calaway says, "we had to stop what he was doing and send him the articles and pictures. He had to post them."

While attending a conference at Mayo Clinic, they discussed brand journalism.

"We didn't know what it was called, but we knew that was the direction we were trying to take it," Calaway says.

He recalls being told, "You're ahead of the game, because you have so much content." What the hospital needed was to speed publishing on its own platforms.

The new PressPage software allowed communicators to take charge of the site without relying on IT. "We're a very small staff," Calaway says. "But I can post myself now, and it takes a matter of minutes to get it out there."

The software also makes it easier to post on Facebook, Twitter and other social media platforms, and journalists have begun retweeting the hospital's links to stories.

In the past, Cook Children's relied on traditional PR pitching, hoping a newspaper or TV station would follow up and frame the story in a way the hospital found helpful.

"Now we just tell our story [on the website]," Calaway says.

News you can use

Cook Children tells its stories in a journalistic fashion, offering a new story every day. Cook Children's emphasizes practical matters that are helpful for patients, such as a recent piece on 10 ways to help your child during standardized testing. The story is written by a licensed psychologist and clinic manager of Cook Children's Behavioral Health.

Cook Children's gave the website a separate URL, CheckupNewsroom.com, so that it would have an identity distinct from the organization's. As staff members come to recognize the value of the site, and about 50 physicians have contributed articles. Child psychologists, nutritionists, chefs, security people and others have contributed.

Justin Smith, a pediatrician, serves as medical advisor for digital health and has a column called @TheDocSmitty. Other advisers include an endocrinologist and a nutritionist. The hospital emphasizes its experts by posting short bios at the bottom of the stories.

Analytics help communicators prove the value of the site to skeptical staffers. Calaway says: "I've had a pediatrician going, 'Does anybody actually read this?' And so when you can come back and say, 'This story was read by 120,000 people or 50,000 people or even 3,000 people,' it's big, because it shows that people are actually getting the information."

The site has proven successful in reaching journalists as well. In November, Smith wrote a blog post titled, "Your child tested positive for the flu. But does she really have it?" The story caught the attention of a local TV station.

"We tweeted it out," Calaway says. "In no time at all, it had been requested that he do a live interview."

]]>Newsroom,SaaS,PressPage,Case,contentMon, 14 Dec 2015 00:00:00 -0600From the horse’s mouth: Q&A with Utrecht Universityhttps://www.presspage.com/news/from-the-horses-mouth-qa-with-utrecht-university/
https://www.presspage.com/news/from-the-horses-mouth-qa-with-utrecht-university/Utrecht University has been using a PressPage newsroom for a year and a half. What has the experience been like so far? Which effect has the newsroom had on their reach? A short Q&A with press officer Roy Keeris.
]]>1. Why is a newsroom important for Utrecht University?

‘We used our own system for a long time, but we were looking for a platform with additional possibilities. We wanted to add photos and videos to our content, and make it easily sharable through social media. PressPage offered a straightforward way to do this. The newsroom simplifies the sharing of content, thereby increasing its reach. Our policy is to accommodate our audience's wishes as best we can. More and more journalists ask for photos, for instance. With the newsroom, it’s very easy for them to access and download what they need.’

2. How does the newsroom fit into your communications strategy?

‘We aim to accomplish three things with our communications. Firstly, we want to enhance our reputation, partly by distributing our publications more successfully. Secondly, we like to visualize our news where we can. Lastly, it is our goal to use the latest technologies we can for our communications. The PressPage newsroom checks all of these boxes.’

3. What results has the newsroom brought you so far?

4. How would you describe working with PressPage?

‘Very positively! If we run into a challenge, the support team at PressPage is always very quick to respond. We often have an answer within ten minutes. Also, they’re always willing to listen to and consider any suggestions we may have regarding possible adjustments or improvements. This all makes for a very pleasant collaboration, of course.’

State University of California: Newsroom key for crisis PR

When a fire forced California State University San Marcos to cancel classes and delay commencement, PressPage helped communicators keep the campus informed. Read the full story here.

]]>UU,Utrecht,Education,University,CaseWed, 02 Jul 2014 05:40:51 -0500Quick response key to California wildfire commshttps://www.presspage.com/news/quick-response-key-to-california-wildfire-comms/
https://www.presspage.com/news/quick-response-key-to-california-wildfire-comms/Newsroom plays key role in crisis situation.When a fire forced California State University San Marcos to cancel classes and delay commencement, PressPage helped communicators keep the campus informed.
]]>Whether they work in tornado alley or an earthquake zone, virtually every communications team has a crisis plan to prepare for the worst.

But are you prepared to speedily post updates to your website and social media when trees are falling or flames crown the hills nearby?

As the university evacuated students and staff, canceled classes and finals, and postponed commencement, a four-person communications team kept stakeholders informed with the help of social media and PressPage's innovative newsroom technology.

"It was very fast-paced, but we all felt like we knew what our job was and how to do it," says Cathy Baur, associate vice president for communications.

The college, which has 11,300 students, was threatened by one of nine infernos to erupt throughout San Diego County the week of May 12. Even as communicators updated the website and put out wildfires online, the campus served as the command post and staging area for the 800 firefighters and police officers who responded. The center also offered shower facilities and a sleeping area for emergency personnel.

University communications were embedded in the emergency operations center, keeping them close to sources in the police, risk management, health and safety teams, and campus administrators.

"When the fires broke out, we knew it would be a valuable resource for communicating out," Baur says.

Evacuating the campus

It was a chaotic week. Roads were crowded as the university and its neighbors evacuated. The next day, when the winds changed direction, the college considered evacuating the command center itself.

"As folks were leaving campus, you could see the hills behind the school were on fire," Baur says.

Communications stayed on top of things with rapid-fire messaging through the website new center and social media. PressPage made all the difference in easily updating the website and integrating social media, Baur says.

"At the beginning of the evacuation and fire, we were providing updates every three to five minutes," she says. "We understood the importance of being able to provide the information that we could and continuing to fill in the details as the situation evolved."

Public Information Officers Margaret Chantung and Christine Vaughan and Social Media Specialist Katie Chappell also worked from the center and from home. As Chappell monitored the social media juggernaut, the others answered media questions and updated information on the website.

Chappell monitored social media for questions and rumors, offering insight into what questions students and others were asking in social media. The team could then adjust its communications to address those issues.

Tweets and B-roll

From May 14-19, CSUSM communicators wrote 24 posts and sent out more than 200 tweets and replies, Chappell says.

The university had been using PressPage for only two months, but the platform's advantages were obvious, team members say. Crises bring accelerated demands from the press, but Vaughan says she was able to update the website from home using an iPad. The college offered photographs, B-roll, and other information that the media could grab.

"The big benefit was how quickly we were able to get it up and how easy it was to access PressPage," Vaughan says.

Evacuated students were asking when they could clear out their rooms. Others wanted to know about air quality or textbook buybacks. Communicators offered frequent updates to keep people informed.

Damage to the college's 304-acre campus was minimal, CSUSM reported. Flames burned through chaparral on the southern perimeter and came close to the central plant, but physical damage was limited to smoke, a power outage, and a ruptured coil that caused flooding in three rooms.

The communications went on after the fire. The college answered questions about graduation—rescheduled for May 24 and 25—and used social media to inform the students about the new dates.

Communicators also posted a statement by President Karen Haynes, who praised the first responders who battled a fire that burned nearly 2,000 acres and destroyed 40 structures.

"We are especially grateful for the eight military Sea Hawk helicopters and the Cal Fire DC 10 Air Tank that flew over our hills making drops of flame retardant and water; and to the firefighters and police from so many other districts who came together to fight these fires," she wrote. "Their efforts ensured the safety of our campus and saved so many homes and businesses in our surrounding community."

It appears that at least some students and others were grateful. One Twitter user tweeted CSUSM, "thank you to who ever [sic] runs this account. You've made this so much easier."

This was written by Russell Working, a staff writer at Ragan Communications, and originally appeared onRagan.com.

]]>Newsroom,Wildfire,Crisis,CaseMon, 30 Jun 2014 05:17:40 -0500London borough’s interactive newsroom courts press, residents and visitorshttps://www.presspage.com/news/london-boroughrsquos-interactive-newsroom-courts-press-residents-and-visitors/
https://www.presspage.com/news/london-boroughrsquos-interactive-newsroom-courts-press-residents-and-visitors/Using a PressPage platform, Hackney grabs news coverage and offers a splashy site for tourists.Last summer a gambling company called Paddy Power won an appeal against an east London council trying to prevent it from opening a betting shop.

Hackney, another London borough, was fighting the proliferation of gambling establishments and wanted to piggyback on the news.

Hackney posted a sharp statement from the mayor, calling companies like Paddy Power “financial vampires, preying on vulnerable people in areas of high deprivation.” Then communicators tweeted key media, scoring coverage, even though Hackney wasn’t a party to the suit.

The tweet proved the success of a strategy of eschewing press releases in favor of blogging and targeted tweets, says Polly Cziok, head of Hackney’s communications and consultation.

“What that resulted in was really, really strong coverage for us ... It wasn’t our story. It was somebody else’s story, but it allowed us to respond to that story in a news blog style.”

Opera reviews and a ‘ghostpoet’

You can’t fire off a press release every time you want to comment on the news, Cziok says. But you can blog your position and spread it socially, which PressPage makes it easy to do.

The council website targets the borough’s 246,000 residents looking to pay a fine or figure out library hours, drawing 300,000 users per month. Its old newsroom was just a list of press releases and downloadable images. Hackney turned to PressPage.

“We’ve been looking to create a much, much more interactive newsroom for our website,” Cziok says.

The visitor-oriented Destination Hackney is an appealing site resembling the Time Out London guide. It touts Hackney restaurants, clubs, and events. There are tabs at the top for things like “what’s on” and “food and drink,” and Destination Hackney provides information on topics like clubs. It posts opera reviews (“Aida”) and articles (“Ghostpoet to perform at Hackney Empire”).

A richer home page

Unlike many organizations, Hackney used PressPage to create the front page, rather than just the newsroom. PressPage allowed Hackney to cheaply get more mileage from a website that otherwise was creaky and old-fashioned. The home page is much richer in video and images than the rest of the site, Cziok says.

This means that page looks better than the rest of the site, but “it was so much easier and cheaper just to shove PressPage on the front than to completely redesign the site,” she adds.

The simple platform is easy for communicators to manage, so that everyone on the team can update it, Cziok says. This means content stays fresher.

The social media-friendly platform makes it easier to optimize the content for search engines. A content editor on searched Google for “What’s the best place to get a drink in Hackney.” Communicators were delighted that their page came up second only to Time Out.

“That was brilliant,” Cziok says, “because obviously Time Out is such an established London brand—and for us to come in just behind that is fantastic.”

Blog coverage

Destination Hackney (and its YouTube channel) are also landing coverage and mentions places like Blog London, which posted a video on “Hackney’s best markets.”

The new platform, both for the city and its tourism efforts, encourages staffers to be more creative, Cziok says.

“They’re not just thinking, ‘Is this story a press release?’” she says. “Well, no, it doesn’t matter if it isn’t. You can do something else with it instead.”

This was written by Russell Working, a staff writer at Ragan Communications, and originally appeared onRagan.com.

]]>Hackney,London,CaseThu, 17 Oct 2013 08:36:00 -0500Simplyhealth establishes "two-way" conversation through their newsroomhttps://www.presspage.com/news/simplyhealth-two-way-conversation-through-newsroom-us/
https://www.presspage.com/news/simplyhealth-two-way-conversation-through-newsroom-us/A good way for people to interact with all the content they have to offer.Simplyhealth is a UK-based healthcare company with a large customer base, and the leading provider of cash plans. Over three million customers, as well as around 20.000 companies choose Simplyhealth as their healthcare provider. The company has been using their newsroom since April of this year in order to make communication and engagement with the public less “one-way”, and to provide the public with easily accessible documents.
]]>Simplyhealth is a UK-based healthcare company with a large customer base. It is also the leading provider of cash plans; a system of financial planning common in the UK that helps customers to budget for the cost of visits to healthcare professionals (dentist, optician, physiotherapist, etc.). Simplyhealth was formed in 2009 after bringing together its family of five healthcare companies with a history that dates back 140 years. Nowadays over three million customers, as well as around 20.000 companies choose Simplyhealth as their healthcare provider.

The colourful, joyfully designed website of Simplyhealth is not what you would expect from a healthcare company, as it definitely stands out from the sober sites we expect to see from insurance companies. Simplyhealth has been using their newsroom since April of this year. Their main goal was to make communication and engagement with their customers and other stakeholders less “one-way”, and to provide the public with easily accessible documents. According to Simplyhealth's PR and Social Media Manager Caroline Newton, the newsroom is mostly used by journalists, but customers also make up a significant part of the audience. On average 1000 to 1500 people visit the newsroom each month, to which new content is added multiple times a week.

The system is easy to use for both her and her colleagues as well as for journalists and customers, says Newton. The desired “two-way conversation” can now be realised with the use of comment boxes and forms, and the fact that the newsroom is connected directly with Simplyhealth's social media channels.
Their multimedia library is filled with images and many informative video's and the company also regularly publish surveys, research papers and fact sheets about all things healthcare, which are downloaded by customers and press.

]]>case,simplyhealth,uk,healthcare,cashplan,newsroom,engagement,customer,companiesFri, 20 Sep 2013 05:52:39 -0500Case: MGM Advantage's customer engagementhttps://www.presspage.com/news/case-mgm-advantage-customer-engagement-us/
https://www.presspage.com/news/case-mgm-advantage-customer-engagement-us/Newsroom technology improves company's engagement with customers in a big way.MGM Advantage is among the fastest growing businesses in the UK retirement income market. The company's newsroom has been up-to-speed since late 2012, and has seen a serious increase in traffic and downloads, fulfilling MGM Advantage's wish to make people more involved with the company and enable them to take away its news and content.
]]>MGM Advantage is a mutual society in the retirement income market, as well as the longest-registered company in the UK. It's one of the fastest growing businesses in its sector and has won a fair share of major industry awards.MGM Advantage does a good job of actively profiling itself and reaching out to the public. The company does this in various ways, and is actively using various channels to spread its news to the public.

MGM Advantage has been using PressPage for their newsroom since October 2012. The goal was to find a new system that established more engagement with customers and journalists, and that enabled readers to 'take away' the content they find interesting. These functionalities were not present in the old system. Also, MGM's Paul Keeble, head of media relations, had started to incorporate social media channels into his strategy, and wanted to continue doing this as smooth as possible.

Keeble names the level of configurability 'one of the great advantages of the PressPage system to other newsroom systems.' The possibility to customize on newsroom-level as well as individual release-level is a real bonus, enabling him to literally switch functionalities on or off as desired.

]]>case,newsroom,engagement,mgm,advantage,customer,retirementTue, 13 Aug 2013 06:32:00 -0500Case: PressPage enables real-time public relationshttps://www.presspage.com/news/case-presspage-enables-real-time-public-relations-us/
https://www.presspage.com/news/case-presspage-enables-real-time-public-relations-us/How the CIPR has been running their social newsroom successfully for 12 months The modern media no longer simply needs a good story: in the contemporary world, they are also looking for interactive and multimedia content. But how is that best supplied in a press release? In December 2011 the CIPR faced just such an issue. The limitations of their website content management system meant that adding quotes, photography, video and audio to enhance our news stories was a time-consuming process, even before attempting to integrate directly with social media.
Now, the CIPR’s newsroom is driven by PressPage, the leading content-sharing-platform technology provider for social newsrooms, virtual press centres, and online media hubs.
]]>The CIPR wanted an active hub for their news items and press releases, a location for rich media content where they could place engagement at the heart of their offering. PressPage’s newsroom technology enabled them to do this with a click of a button with fully branded social media releases, completely integrated in their existing website.

PressPage allowed the website to become a news centre and a news hub for all 10,000 CIPR members.

Another important element of using PressPage is that the CIPR’s press releases are not just ‘sent out', in the sense that a traditional news release would be emailed or faxed to journalists in its entirety. Instead, it is intended to be discovered via search and pointed to by circulating a link to relevant contacts using both traditional email and other social channels. An example of this is the CIPR's Facebook newsroom; an app directly launched from within the PressPage platform.

The newsroom is not only user friendly and easy to manage, but it also delivers a focal point for their website. Not only does it allow the CIPR to create their own stories, but also to become opinion leaders. They can put out a range of rich media content within an hour of a breaking news story and aggregate to social channels in an instant.

]]>CIPR,Newsroom,caseMon, 22 Apr 2013 09:04:00 -0500Case: St John Ambulance online reputationhttps://www.presspage.com/news/case-st-john-ambulance-online-reputation-us/
https://www.presspage.com/news/case-st-john-ambulance-online-reputation-us/How PressPage's technology played a key role in regaining control over reputationSt John Ambulance, a leading first aid charity, has been serving Western Australia for over 100 years; their primary role being to teach first aid and to care for the sick and injured. Over recent years, some unfortunate incidents began to cause serious reputation damage to the community based organisation.
With the assistance of Engage ORM and PressPage's innovative technology, providing the basis for their social newsroom, the organisation has been able to recover its positive reputation.
]]>In today's tough society, reputation is a critical factor in sustaining and growing an organisation. It is common knowledge that the public is more inclined to support an organisation with a strong reputation, than one that does not have this asset.

St John Ambulance is the common name for a number of charitable organisations dedicated to the teaching and practice of medical first aid and the provision of ambulance services. St John Ambulance originated in the UK, but organisations can be found in more than ten countries worldwide.In Western Australia, St John Ambulance has been serving the public for over a century. Over recent years, some unfortunate incidents began to cause serious problems for the community-based organisation. Negative press coverage concerning past incidents would continue to pop up in online searches, casting a shadow over the many success stories and positive public feedback. This didn’t only cause serious reputation damage to the organisation but also affected the morale of the employees.

With the assistance of Engage ORM and PressPage's innovative technology, providing the basis for their social newsroom, the organisation has been able to recover its positive reputation and at the same time engaging the community on a whole new level.

]]>case,online,reputation,ambulanceWed, 17 Apr 2013 03:07:00 -0500Case: Online newsroom plays crucial role in game launchhttps://www.presspage.com/news/online-newsroom-speelt-cruciale-rol-in-game-lancering-en-us/
https://www.presspage.com/news/online-newsroom-speelt-cruciale-rol-in-game-lancering-en-us/How MEC launched Jumbo's iPawn with a tight budget.Jumbo launched with a new generation games for which the iPad was the board. The iPad providing a dynamic board with special effects. The board of the game can be downloaded as a free app from the appstore, Jumbo's iPawns are sold in toy stores.
MEC's regional HQ in Amsterdam was challenged to launch Jumbo's iPawn just before the holidays in the Netherlands, England, Germany and Belgium with a campaign budget of only £ 7,300.
PressPage, the leading provider of social newsroom technology, was used to build the "Pressroom" to supply bloggers and Tweeps with relevant and rich content ready for use in their publications.
]]>From the beginning it was clear that with a budget of only $ 11,400.00 a large paid publicity campaign was not feasible. But the social media team at MEC knew that many consumers actively scour the Internet for digital versions of traditional games. All MEC had to do was find these consumers, activate these and create iPawn ambassadors.

The social media team at MEC selected the right influencers (bloggers and Tweeps) by country and built a digital "Pressroom" in 4 languages ​​with all the information and content about the new iPawn range.

Influencers were given a link to the Social Media Press Release and bloggers were provided with enough samples to test and review the iPawns before they were available in the shops.

Finally, the team activated consumers with an iPawn Facebook page, including a welcome page with a game element. The entire month of November, the social media team made it possible for an existing fan to win an iPawn set. This contest was boosted with targeted Like Ads and Sponsored Stories on Facebook.

With a campaign budget of only $ 11,400.00 - MEC achieved some incredible results for their client:

Over 80.000 iPawn games sold (80% of total stock);

Additional iPawn turnover of + $ 1,016,000.00 in less than 4 weeks;

Growth in online buzz volume was 2,915% in November as compared to October;

]]>Partner,MEC,iPad,iPawn,caseTue, 08 Jan 2013 04:06:00 -0600Case: Nyenrode New Business Schoolhttps://www.presspage.com/news/case-nyenrode-new-business-school-en-us/
https://www.presspage.com/news/case-nyenrode-new-business-school-en-us/Newsroom content boosts website traffic of Nyenrode New Business School.Nyenrode New Business School decided to expand its static website with a social media newsroom in May 2011. They opted for PressPage's technology.

Below is a short case description as released by Nyenrode New Business School today.